Culture Making Articles items tagged glorious impossible

The glorious impossible

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

In a lovely Christmas book for children, Madeleine L’Engle called the Incarnation “the glorious impossible”—an unthinkable idea that nevertheless shines with possibility and hope. It’s a good description of the gospel as a whole. And it is precisely the impossibility of the gospel that makes it so culturally potent and so perennially relevant. The gospel constantly challenges every human culture with the possibility that we live within misplaced horizons.

—Culture Making, p.176

Heaven on earth in plastic

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?Finder's comment: "I found this while closing shop at the cafe where I work. I think a girl, who was practicing what she learned at massage school, dropped it." Culture Making gloss: "Culture, then, is the furniture of heaven. (And indeed, Revelation makes it clear, in the words of Belinda Carlisle, that 'heaven is a place on earth.') It is simply not true, according to Isaiah and John—and according to the whole sweep of the biblical story from beginning to end—that “souls” are the only eternal things, or that human beings are all that last into eternity."?

business card holder, found by Kyle in Seattle, published as FOUND Magazine's Find of the Day, 30 October 2008 :: via FFFFOUND! (no relation)

Jesus and the cultures

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

In quintessentially modern fashion, Niebuhr framed his book in terms of two highly abstract words: Christ and Culture. What kind of book would he have written—what kind of cultural influence would his book have had—if he had been assigned the title Jesus and the Cultures? Christ is a Greek translation of a Hebrew word; Jesus is the name of a Hebrew man who radically redefined the meaning of that Hebrew word by applying it to his ministry of healing, confrontation, reconciliation, and suffering. Culture is a broad and abstract word, but the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and his first-century followers and biographers, lived very consciously not in “culture” but in the midst of many “cultures.”

—Culture Making, p.180

Our most basic questions

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

If we believe that God is still on the move in human cultures, then our most basic questions have to be, What is God doing in culture? What is his vision for the horizons of the possible and the impossible? Who are the poor who are having good news preached to them? Who are the powerful who are called to spend their power on behalf of the powerless? Where is the impossible becoming possible?

—Culture Making, p.214